UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

If you are the regular reader of my blog, you may notice that I’ve unpublished a recent series of rants over the current and escalating war between Automattic (really, Matt Mullenweg himself) and WP Engine.

I’ve unpublished them because they were angry and unfocused rants, as I struggled to get a handle on why what is happening is happening, and what it really means to (and for) me, as well as the larger WordPress community.

This afternoon I channeled that frustration into some long-overdue household tasks — fixing a kitchen cabinet door, shampooing the carpet in the upstairs hallway, clearing out the clogged drain of a bathroom sink — and those few hours of manual labor gave me time to sift through the thoughts and feelings piling up in my brain.

I realized that the heart of the matter is a lack of common agreement on the nature of free open source software (FOSS) — specifically, both the ethics and the economics of FOSS. Now that I’ve realized what is at the heart of my recent frustration and anger, I can start thinking — and writing — more constructively about it, rather than firing off aimless missives.

A more coherent mini-essay on this topic is forthcoming. But for now, the earlier angry posts are unpublished. Gone, but not forgotten. And, well, not really gone. Thanks to WordPress.

Stay tuned…

In the meantime, read this. Then this. Then consider this.

A small indie developer creates an amazingly powerful and well-designed WordPress plugin. Eventually it grows too big for him and his small team to maintain, so he sells it to a larger plugin development company. That company, boosted even further by the value this plugin adds to their stable of products, gets bought by an even larger hosting company. Another company — one owned by the same guy who controls the open source WordPress project itself — was for years a substantial shareholder of said hosting company, but eventually sold off its shares to a private equity firm that now controls the hosting company.

Then, a war breaks out between those two big companies. Things escalate, and (because one side is controlled by that guy who, when he’s not on safari in Africa, is busy with his finger in several different pies, representing an obvious conflict of interest) the open source project summarily takes over the free base version of that plugin I was talking about at the beginning.

I’m a small indie plugin developer too. Luckily, I’m probably too small and insignificant to have the core team steal my work from me, but hey… open source is open source. People can use it however they want, with no obligation towards the creators.

Also, rich guys apparently don’t understand irony.

Finally, let’s get the terminology straight here. Matt is calling this a “fork” of Advanced Custom Fields. But a fork doesn’t get to keep the original URL, download stats and reviews. A fork starts from square one. A fork is, essentially, what the ACF team was forced in this situation to do with their own original plugin.

No WordPress plugin developer should ever have to post a message like this on their website:

I just went to log into my WordPress.org account to deal with some tech support for one of my plugins, and I noticed that the login screen has a new checkbox:

I really can’t believe the way Matt is dragging the whole community down with his petty vendetta against WP Engine. It’s pathetic.

Update: Meanwhile, as this was going on, Matt was in Africa… uh… dehorning rhinos. It’s apparently to protect them from poachers but he describes the whole situation in the awkward, unrelatable way that only a billionaire can pull off.

My past few blog posts have been about the feud between Matt Mullenweg (acting as the self-appointed singular voice of the WordPress community, like the Borg Queen) and WP Engine (a big WordPress-focused hosting company, with a controlling share owned by an inherently-gross private equity firm).

Well guess what, WP Engine sucks too. Over the course of the past year I’ve moved a bunch of my clients over to WP Engine and now I am beginning to regret that choice, as I’m starting to see those clients express frustration over WP Engine’s egregious traffic limit overage charges.

Their pricing model is deliberately misleading, with hidden upsells and extra fees. They suck.

The main reason I’ve been moving clients to WP Engine is to get away from hosting I had previously been managing myself on Digital Ocean. I like the Virtual Private Server (VPS) model, where someone like me has direct access to the operating system of a virtualized server. The problem is, these VPS providers are a magnet for spammers. Since you can run whatever software you want on your VPS, it’s easy to set up a server to blast out spam. That sucks. The people who do that suck.

There’s one particular spam blocklist, UCEPROTECTL3, that has decided to block the entire subnet of providers like Digital Ocean. If you check the spam blocklist status of a given IP address on Digital Ocean’s network with MXToolBox, you’ll generally find that the only list that’s blocking it is UCEPROTECTL3, so it seems like a silly outlier. Except for the fact that Microsoft uses UCEPROTECTL3 for spam filtering on all Office 365 email accounts. UCEPROTECTL3 really sucks. And Microsoft sucks for relying on it.

In other words, if your website is running on a Digital Ocean server, you can’t set up SMTP (outgoing email) directly on your server — which is the easiest way to send out emails for things like password resets, WooCommerce receipts, etc., because anyone with an Office 365 email account (which is, like, a lot of people, especially in the business world) won’t get your email. It won’t even go to their spam folder. It will get blocked at the server. Just because some stupid spammers are using different servers that also happen to be hosted by Digital Ocean.

Digital Ocean (and other VPS providers — it’s not just them) responded by basically just washing their hands of the whole thing. “Don’t use our servers to send email.” Well, OK. Then what?

There are several ways to route these emails through other providers like SendGrid, Amazon SES, or your own “real” email account. But they all come with cumbersome hoops to jump through. That sucks.

And that’s why I’ve been moving people to WP Engine. For the relatively small number of emails my clients’ websites generate, WP Engine just handles it. Their systems automatically route emails through a legit sender, everyone gets the emails, I don’t have to mess around with a clunky setup process, and my clients don’t have to sign up for another separate service.

But I have a few clients who, for whatever reason, seem to be magnets for malicious traffic. I’ve got safeguards in place to prevent the malicious visitors from doing anything, but the traffic they generate still counts as “visits” towards WP Engine’s unnecessarily low thresholds. And then my clients get slapped with huge overage fees.

I really don’t know where to turn. Every hosting environment seems to suck in its own way. And it makes me just want to get out of this business altogether. That sucks.

I mean, I have a lot sharper words for him than that, but it gets the point across. I want to share two links:

The Verge — Matt Mullenweg: ‘WordPress.org just belongs to me’

Matt himself — Automattic Alignment

Honestly I have kind of thought he sucked ever since I saw the company name “Automattic,” years ago. But so much of what I’ve seen from him since then just reinforces it. He tries to act magnanimous, but he’s just like every other tech billionaire. You don’t get into that kind of position without having a grotesquely distorted sense of self-importance.

I get that what he intended by the statement “WordPress.org just belongs to me” is that he literally just owns the domain name. But it’s hard not to believe that the way that statement is easily misinterpreted is really what he feels. Yeah, he co-founded the WordPress open source project, as a fork of earlier blogging software called b2. But even if he were single-handedly responsible for the origins of WordPress — which he decidedly is not — it would still be a very tin-earred statement that an open source project “belongs” to an individual. (Honestly, the way he’s framing the battle against WP Engine these days makes it really seem like he wishes WordPress wasn’t GPL, so he didn’t legally have to allow it to remain open source forever.)

I don’t think Matt is as bad of a human being as Elon Musk, but there are similarities in their origins as guys who were part of something as it got off the ground and became huge, and were the ones who managed to take control and credit for everything. Then, perceived as unassailable technology and business geniuses, they were able to leverage their right-place-right-time moments to launch themselves to a level of status and wealth that is disproportionate to their actual contributions.

Anyway, suffice to say, as much as I live and breathe WordPress, I’ve been strongly critical of the direction Matt has insisted on taking the software for several years. It’s clear he has extreme conflicts of interest between his role as the leader of the open source project, and his multiple for-profit businesses that wouldn’t exist without it.

The worst part, to someone like me — a relatively small potatoes indie plugin developer/freelance web designer — is that he really does not seem to understand how WordPress is used in the real world. And it’s a worse product as a result.

If I had been an employee at Automattic this week, I absolutely would’ve taken the buy-out.